[unconditioned, clairvoyant] faculty or 'soul' is 'a disease when it
becomes a state of the self-conscious, educated, self-possessed human
being of civilisation.'[22] 'Second sight,' Hegel thinks, was a product
of an earlier day and earlier mental condition than ours.

Approaching this almost untouched subject--the early psychical condition
of man--not from the side of metaphysical speculations like Hegel, but
with the instruments of modern psychology and physiology, Dr. Max Dessoir,
of Berlin, following, indeed, M. Taine, has arrived, as we saw, at
somewhat similar conclusions. 'This fully conscious life of the spirit,'
in which we moderns now live, 'seems to rest upon a substratum of reflex
action of a hallucinatory type.' Our actual modern condition is _not_
'fundamental,' and 'hallucination represents, at least in its nascent
condition, the main trunk of our psychical existence.'[23]

Now, suppose that the remote and unknown ancestors of ours who first
developed the doctrine of souls had not yet spread far from 'the main
trunk of our psychical existence,' far from constant hallucination. In
that case (at least, according to Dr. Dessoir's theory) their psychical
experiences would be such as we cannot estimate, yet cannot leave, as a
possibility influencing religion, out of our calculations.

If early men were ever in a condition in which telepathy and clairvoyance
(granting their possibility) were prevalent, one might expect that
faculties so useful would be developed in the struggle for existence. That
they are deliberately cultivated by modern savages we know. The Indian
foster-mother of John Tanner used, when food was needed, to suggest
herself into an hypnotic condition, so that she became _clairvoyante_ as
to the whereabouts of game. Tanner, an English boy, caught early
by the Indians, was sceptical, but came to practise the same art, not